I give him a voice, like a ventriloquist. I try not to move my lips, but I’m mostly talking out of one side of my mouth.
I hop Zip back and forth from my stomach to hers, then ask, “What do you think is wrong with us?”
“Polio. We both have it.” Quickly she says it, as if she does not have to think.
The word fills the room like a marble dropping on the tile floor, cold and hard. Then I remember where I first heard it, the year before when I was five. It was soon after my family moved to Hot Springs, Arkansas, where often we’d go downtown to buy an ice cream or go to a movie on the main street. And there, on the undulating sidewalk, going up and down hills, past the bath houses, filled with the hot water from the springs that give the town its name, was a child. Every once in a while, a child, walking past, holding onto the arm of his or her mother. Going slow, working hard. Steel braces down their legs, sometimes crutches on their arms like sticks. They were of different sizes, different ages, almost always bigger than I. The steel of their braces was silver, yet came off as heavy dark lines wired to their bodies, like dolls mounted on displays. They moved like snails. They did not seem happy. They were bumbling.
You could always see them coming, working hard to get up the hills. Probably their families brought them for the hot springs baths. And I was afraid of them. My mother explained they’d had polio, which I had to think hard to pronounce. A disease that came to them on a germ and took them over and left them wearing the steel things on their legs like new clothes. It was a hand, I decided, that reached up from an underworld to choose certain children to wall off into its world. It was like a land in a story. It was a hole one fell into and then slid down, like the one in Alice in Wonderland, or like the funnel hole that Dorothy flew through to the Land of Oz. Yet no one ever came back from this world whole. They all returned marked.
After these children passed, I glanced back at them. I did not want to get close. I learned the name for what had made them the way they were and then dismissed it. I thought of what had happened to them as the dark side in a story that careened and sped to what was bound to be a satisfying end. All stories had dark sides, hard struggle, and then satisfying ends.
I skipped down the street in my white sandals. I ate ice cream in the drugstore and bought new crayons in the dimestore. I returned to our wood-sided station wagon to ride home in the third seat.
•
So. I look back at my night visitor. This is what this is.
Her eyes watch me. They are liquid and calm. It seems she has practiced knowing what she knows for a long time. The Polio Hole. Both of us have fallen into it. I am now one of them.
The thought slides down into the core of me. In an echo of sadness, it lands. No, I do not want to go through life like this. I do not want to be one of them. Yet, as I look over at my visitor, it is clear. For us, this is not a choice.
And then, I think again, So. So what? I pick up Zip. I set him against my visitor’s shoulder, and we sing, “I love you a bushel and a peck, a bushel and a peck and a hug around the neck.” We sing loudly, raucously, brilliantly, as if we are on the way to our own radio show and a gold album.
•
Ask any geologist, and he or she can tell you: The earth is made up of many layers. The core existed long before dust and lava and stone rained down on it. Currents, wind, or waves transform the surface at every turn. The new layers are to be tilled or folded; so they, too, will be changed, day by day, minute by minute, second by second, always. The surface is forever in flux. But the core stays just as it was on the first day.
We are not different from the earth. I was who I was long before I was changed into who I was to become.
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